Shawty Got LOW, Low, Low, Low…

I woke up at 5:04 AM completely wet. Soaked. One of those really scary low blood sugar moments when I wake up and my clothes are drenched. As if I just jumped in a pool, drenched. My hair is damp. My body is shaking and I have one thing on my mind. Literally my mind is blank – sometimes it takes me over 5 minutes of contemplating in my head whether or not I should remove myself from my bed to head into the kitchen to the fridge. I usually keep a granola bar or a juice box by my bed. A package of honey or a packet of sugar from Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts also frequent the nightstands on either side of my bed. Sometimes I drink/use them though and forget to replace them. I like to live on the edge and sweat it out – pun intended.

So after pulling myself from my bed acting all zombie-like and still sweating profusely, I gain an obscene amount of strength which basically makes me feel as if I’m the Incredible Hulk. I feel like a stampede walking down the stairs – meanwhile it’s probably not like that at all but it’s how I’m imagining myself. Woman on a mission: eat carb’s immediately. Sugarrrrrrr please!!!

I open up the fridge and stare. And stare some more because my blood sugar is far below the normal range and my brain is not functioning properly. I pull a bottle of Tropicana OJ out of the fridge and fumble to find a glass/coffee mug/cup I can drink it out of. Sometimes if I’m really desperate (also really lazy) I’ll literally chug from the bottle. Having low blood sugar doesn’t only make me cranky, irritable and/or moody – it also makes me very anxious and more psycho than I usually am. Lucky everyone! Sometimes I revert to childlike tendencies and start to cry. So about now I took a few swigs of my OJ and I need something else to stabilize the carb’s I just drank to bring my blood sugar up. I try to find a protein or some other protein/carb combo – naturally I decide on Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked. Other Ashley low-BG (blood glucose) staples are: peanut butter on a spoon, Nutella on a spoon, apple with almond butter, any fruit that’s on the counter, any & all leftovers in the fridge are also fair game…

After eating something I’ll usually sit down and stare at myself or rummage around for my blood glucose test kit. I set up my test kit – insert my little test strip and prick my finger with a lancet. Then I try to squeeze out a tiny drop of blood – except the vault is completely fucking dry. It’s the worst – so I have to prick another finger until my machine accepts what little amount of blood my fingers would like to offer up today.

Just as expected! My meter reads a good old: 33 mg/dL.

Ummm….WHUT?! I just chugged Tropicana and ate like a half a pint of Ben & Jerry’s? And my blood sugar is still 33 mg/dL. I’m scared. I’m freaked out. It’s 5:28AM now – I’m all alone and why is my blood sugar still so low? Anxiety. Anxiety. Anxiety. Help. Scared. What do I do?

Pour another glass of OJ / Mott’s Apple Juice / whatever other sugar-filled drink and head back to my bedroom with a package of glucose tablets (Raspberry flavored) and maybe another snack.

Raspberry Glucose Tabs = Best Flavor

Now I’m freezing. Because my body just sweat through my sheets. Put on new pajamas. Get back into bed. Chug more juice. I’m so fucking full – I can’t eat another thing for hours. I still don’t feel well – maybe I’ll try to go back to sleep? Wonder where my blood sugar is at now? Re-test. 54 mg/dL! Going up – yay? Still kinda freakin’ low – I’ll wait a little while longer and re-test again. I know I can’t eat or drink anything else because it’s 5:45am and I’m obviously not hungry and now I’m wasting time being awake when I should be sleeping. I drink another half a glass of juice, I open up some gross organic granola bar and take a bite. Then I fall asleep.

Fast forward to 8:30AM when I’m waking up late for whatever appointment I had this morning (missing it, obviously…) rescheduling that shit, of course. My face is basically stuck to this chocolate pomegranate whatever the hell gross cereal bar I half ate in the middle of the night. My room is a mess. I test my blood sugar, 245 mg/dL. WHATTTT THE FFFFFFF? WHY?!?!?

Wasn’t I just bottoming out at 33 mg/dL three hours before? Why am I sky-rocketed now? It took my body so long to absorb the sugar I was putting into it and not doing ANYTHING – to wake up this morning to high blood sugar. C’monnnn – just can’t win. I’m exhausted from not sleeping and I’m exhausted from having high blood sugar. Take insulin to correct my high blood sugar – which sometimes takes hours to come back down to normal range (70-120) – and try to function as a normal part of society.

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2 thoughts on “Shawty Got LOW, Low, Low, Low…”

My daughter is 6 and T1D. My ex-husband is also T1D, so I am super aware of this from an outsider’s standpoint. The thing is, I am so scared for my daughter to go out in the world one day, because this… this exact thing… is going to happen to her more than once. I put juice by her bed. I test her sugars obsessively. I sometimes give her too much of a snack at night because she is low and I am scared. I have made her eat when she was sick, I have made her eat when she was full… and, even in your child, seeing her shaky because she went to the pool and swam? Or having her pass out on the playground at school because we weren’t told that they switched her play time? Every day I am in fear of something going wrong, of the meter not working, of a teeny bit of sugar that tells me a wrong reading, or miscalculating, of looking at the Lantus and thinking it’s the Humalog or vice versa (I check like three times in the morning, I swear, before I give it to her). It’s nothing compared to what she has to see from inside herself, but I’m still scared for her, because I am part of her. She is part of me.

So reading this blog, which I stumbled upon, really meant something to me. Because it’s my daughter’s life, and because this is what my daughter will have happen one day, when I set her free in the world. When I let her go and hope that I have taught her what she needs to know to survive.